GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Books

  • OPM.50 (notes on myself, from) Icarus Deception, Seth Godin, 2012

    I wrote this near the start of this OPM Letter. I started strong in 2021 but then went on a long hiatus before deciding to give this project proper closure. Even so, I thought I’d share as a way to celebrate the half century mark.

    ~

    This book hit me at the perfect time. Seth’s encouragement to step out into the void really hit after having started this OPM Letter project.

    Every few years I feel an urge to level up. After my first gig in a firm, I went to grad school. After Rice, I jumped from a small shop to work to try a corporate firm. Jumped from CAD to BIM. Took some (a lot) time remodeling our house. Slid over over to owner side.

    As discussed in Bob Buford’s Half Time, the best time to start the next thing is before the current thing has run out of steam.

    Maybe that’s the role of this newsletter.
    (2023 note: Doesn’t seem like it. I still enjoy my work, but I’ve moved my focus away from advancing my career.)

    I’m sticking myself out there, as if I’m an expert or something. I’m not. But maybe this project will help me contemplate my work.

    Maybe it results in something worth sharing. Otherwise why share?

    And if it doesn’t go anywhere? At least I’ll remain anonymous. Fame is overrated!

    ~

    Interestingly, I wrote almost nothing about the book in my first draft draft twenty four months ago. And now I can’t remember a single thing from the Icarus Deception aside from the green cover. I bet it had some inspiring moments about putting yourself out there in the new connection economy, but that’s just guessing. But I copied quote back then still resonates.

    Grit is the attitude of someone who realizes she has the power to care and is intent on doing something with it.

    An agency client just sent me a kind note before she retired. Maybe she was just being nice, but if I actually did anything special to earn her compliments, it was only because I cared and did something with it.

    ~

    Some Links

    Mark Starlin writes a fun newsletter every Monday with three quick fictions, a witty sentence, a flash fiction, and a short story. It’s a great start to the week.

    Carolyn Yoo explores the creative practice every week. I dig her warm embrace of the world at large. A great start is this newsletter sharing how she published a zine about finding her wedding dress.

    A few weeks ago I thought I becoming a Glitch-hop aficionado, but I’ve realized it’s too close to big-time EDM. Instead, I’ve been playing this Chiptune playlist on repeat. It reminds me of the days of downloading mods from BBSs.

    X-15 Crash (Pilot Jack McKay survived but was forced to retire early), Mud Lake, Nevada, 1962

    ~

    Thanks for reading!
    Justus Pang, RA

  • OPM.48 (notes on) What your CEO wants you to know, Ram Charan, 2018

    I listened to this book three years ago, and all I remember was his obsession with cash flows. Which isn’t particularly relevant to a guy who has no plans on going back into private practice.

    However, in updating this draft, I was reminded about his last chapter on “synchronization”. It sounds like a gem to revisit. This section is all about sharing information so the team can work together in unity.

    Charan emphasizes the concept of a “social operating mechanism”. It could be a regular update letter, some sort of webtool, or a recurring meeting. The key is that important information is shared and that people walk away energized to tackle the key issues in their responsibilty.

    Charan identifies four key aspects for a good dialogue:

    • Openness – be honest in the search, don’t pre-decide, listen to everyone.
    • Candor – be willing to speak and be honest about the conflict.
    • Informality – encourages candor. don’t be stiff and prepackaged
    • Closure – once done, be disciplined to ensure that follow through happens.

    I’ve tried to adopt this attitude during my time as OPM. With some folks it can be difficult, but I find that acting otherwise just makes it even harder. Social lubrication is real and has earned good feedback from my project mates (admittedly they are all financially incentivized to butter me up).

    However, this past year, I had gotten lax about the regularity of these meetings. I had a few projects with long lead times where I skipped the recurring meetings until things got started in earnest. Unfortunately, I found out on the back end that things just slipped through the cracks until we started meeting regularly.

    So until I find a better solution, I’m resorting to requiring regular (virtual) meetings on my projects. I hate the distraction of having a meeting on the calendar, even if they are for a few minutes. However, I don’t know of a better way to ensure my teams are keeping pace on their jobs.

    Even if I can’t recommend this book as essential, I’m a fan of Charan’s Leadership Pipeline which I have recommended multiple times.

    ~

    Some Links

    A few years ago, CGP Grey went on an information diet to reset his attention habits. My purge won’t go two years like Project Cyclops, but I started July by unsubscribing from news podcasts and YouTube channels.

    One immediate side effect of this cull is that the algorithm has been feeding evergreen comedy, such as British comedy skits. One of my new favorites has Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as competing psychiatrists analyzing each other.

    Weston Parker is a (mostly retired) carpenter who has been sharing lovely poems on A Carpenter’s Point of View. It’s fun to find other industry folks who are practicing the arts. A recent poem includes the line “with good drainage”. I feel seen.

    ~

    Town Hall, Halmstad, Halland, Sweden, 1939

    ~

    Thanks for reading!
    Justus Pang, RA

  • Island Book (1), Evan Dahm, 2019

    The art is lovely, the story is evocative, but it brings up a problem I’ve noticed in some graphic novels — density.

    It’s short story in a book format. Nothing wrong about that, but it left me feeling a little empty. One might argue that Dahm preserved liminal spaces for the reader to insert themselves, but I’m not yet ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.

    Part of the problem may be that it’s a serialized piece of fiction. Maybe the openness was to make room for the author to infill in future volumes.

    Still, this book is a fun read, worth checking out at the library. Maybe my opinion will shift after I’ve read volumes 2 and 3. I’ve put them on hold at the library, it’s certainly earned that.

  • Opus, Satoshi Kon, 1996

    Opus is Kon’s famously unfinished manga. He was lured away by the big screen and then tragically snatched away by pancreatic cancer.

    I had mediocre expectations for an incomplete work by someone who earned their fame in a different medium. Wrong. This book is great, especially with the rough pencil-sketch coda that was discovered after his passing.

    I’m a sucker for authorial gimmicks and the conceit of the artist being dragged into his own story was handled expertly. Given that this was written before he started making movies, I would have forgiven a ham-fisted approach by a young creator (Grant Morrison was mediocre in Animal Man), but Satoshi Kon had already developed a strong command of the craft, which was further distilled in his animated work.

    No doubt, this book is famous because of its legendary creator. But it should be more famous than it is. Opus stands on its own.

    ~

    I first read this as an ebook on my iPad. I finally bought it for my birthday. So much better reading it on paper!

    However, the story has a dark plot twist. The art isn’t graphic, but it’s not suitable for young children, so I hid the book (along with my Sandman graphic novels).

    We moved to Vegas ten years ago but still haven’t settled into a permanent home. One day, we’ll find that home, and I’ll build nice bookshelves to display all the boxes of books that have spent the past decade in our in-law’s garage. By the time that happens, the kids will be old enough to read these novels…if they’re still at home!

    ~

    After cleaning up this two year old draft for publication, we went to the library. My daughter handed me The Panda Problem by Deborah Underwood and Hannah Marks. Now that’s breaking the fourth wall!

    Synchronicity is all around you! <insert CTA here>

  • Coyote America, Dan Flores, 2016

    The story of man versus fauna in America is a dreary one, starting with the ancient forebears who came across the Bering Straits, the spread of Europeans in the 1800’s, and the industrialization of death in the 1900’s.

    The one bright spot amidst the devastation has been the coyote, which has used its persecution in the 20th century to spread throughout the nation, entering its final state (Delaware) in the continental United States during the 2010’s.

    Having evolved as both predator and prey, they can’t rely upon their alpha physique like wolves. Instead, coyotes are whip-smart. They’ve developed a unique social mobility with “Fission-Fusion” tactics, being pack animals when it suited them and becoming loners if necessary. Howling is their means of long distance communication, which influences the local coyote density affecting their litter sizes (ranging from two to nineteen!).

    Aside litters from nineteen, the coyote’s story is quite similar to ours — chatty creatures in the middle of the food chain with a wide range of social flexibility.

    Unfortunately, we also mirror the coyote’s ingeniousness with our deranged attempts to eradicate these “prairie wolves”. It’s a story of brash humans coalescing government power, aiding corporate cronies with cruel policies. As always, it’s appalling to read about our blindness to the destructiveness of our obsessions, even if things have slightly improved with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970’s.

    Through it all, the coyote survived and spread. It was ranked lower than a cockroach in the 1950’s opinion polls. Now it has admirers among city slicker liberals. It is regaining its place as an avatar god of this land, even among the colonizers of this new world.

    Unlike most nature books, this one does not end on a dreary note. But that’s no credit to us. Almost every other creature has disappeared under such slaughter. This time, we’ve been outwitted by the trickster, much to our delight.

    ~

    I started the audiobook at 1.5x but slowed down to 1.0x before the introduction was over. Even though the high speed narration was perfectly intelligible, some books are meant to be savored. It would be disrespectful to rush through such a well told story.

    I wrote the initial draft of this note this two years ago and publishing this post reminds me to listen to it again. It’s still a two month wait at the library, not bad for a book that’s been out for seven years.

    ~

    As a complete tangent, I just stumbled across the album Prairiewolf. It has nothing to do with coyotes, but it’s a chill groove and I hate to ignore synchronicities.

  • My Birthday Haul

    Eight books for age 4+4

    • Opus, Satoshi Kon
    • Boring Postcards USA, Martin Parr
    • World Atlas of Cheese, Nancy Eekhof-Stork
    • 99 Variations on a Proof, Philip Ordlin (the last two were recommendations from post.news over the past few months)

    Not shown:

    1. In the West, Avedon, a big birthday splurge (let’s hope the “cheap” $100 copy from Amazon isn’t totally beat up when it arrives)
    2. How to Say Goodbye, Wendy MacNaughton. The preorder was just announced. Unfortunately this subject will be all too relevant as I cross through my mid 40’s.
    3. Absolutely on Music, Murakami & Ozawa
    4. I Think, Therefore I Draw, Cathcart & Klein (the last two were lucky library finds from yesterday’s excursion).

  • Basic Structures of Buddhism, R. Eno

    While reading the Bodhicaryavatara, I was struck at its resonance with Christianity.

    It has an intense focus on good and bad (defilement), a clear conception of hell, a strident moral directive evangelize (alleviate suffering), and even included a chapter of detailed logical argumentation to prove the another world is more real than our physical world.

    I did not expect this Buddhist text to rhyme so closely to my experience as a reformed Baptist high schooler — there even multiple passages that even vilifies sexual desire!

    Over the past few years, I had focused on Confucianism and Daoism which feels totally foreign from Christianity. I assumed Buddhism would be similarly alien from the religion of my childhood. It wasn’t.

    I needed a quick primer on Buddhism to reset my expectations, and this short essay by Robert Eno delivered. It covered a lot of ground in a quick read and I enjoyed Eno’s slightly irreverent tone. Clearly, he has taught this material many times to sleep deprived college students.

    ~

    To wildly speculate on parallels with Christianity, Buddhism came as a reform religion, stripping away calcified rituals, with an focus on (avoiding) the next life, and had an egalitarian imperative that energized it to spread across the continent.

    In contrast, Confucianism and Daoism were uninterested in the question of salvation. These were elite philosophies that were wrestling with how to craft a state (or withdraw from the brutality of court politics) in the throes of a dying empire.

    ~

    As a pantheistic atheist, I often worry about the old warning “if you believe in nothing you’ll believe in anything”. Hopefully I don’t fall into that trap, but I also can’t shake the intuition that billions of people can’t be all wrong. At the very least, there must something that has made these teachings worth transmitting to the next generation again and again over the millennia.

    ~

    I never skip a chance to plug Robert Eno’s great chinatxt website. Go check it out.

    I started a Great Courses lecture series by Malcom David Eckel, I’m enjoying it so far (two hours into the twelve hour course).

  • Excerpts from Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin

    I’ve always thought I’d read some Chinese philosophy, someday.

    That day came on a sunny afternoon my mind was blown as I was parking my car behind E-Jo, a Korean bone broth restaurant. The History of China podcast was talking about a Han dynasty emperor who used Daoism as his ruling ideology.

    That blew my mind. I always thought Daoists were crazy drunks in a forest, not competing with Confucians in the halls of power.

    Don’t get me wrong, the Tao Te Ching is great stuff for skipping out into the woods. But there is plenty of “leadership advice”. Timely stuff before landing a gig as a Project Manager representing the State.

    ~

    True leaders
    are hardly known to their followers.
    .
    .
    .
    When the work’s done right,
    with no fuss or boasting,
    ordinary people say,
    Oh, we did it.

    excerpt from Tao Te Ching 17

    My project teams have been complimentary of my leadership. Of course, I’m the source of their next project, so it’s hard to know how much of it is sincere. Then again, I guess such compliments are better than the alternative. On my end, I believe that I have the easiest job on the team. I move some paper around and they do all the real work.

    ~

    And so the wise soul
    predominates without dominating,
    and leads without misleading.
    And people don’t get tired
    of enjoying and praising
    one who, not competing,
    has in all the world
    no competitor.

    excerpt from Tao Te Ching 66

    A hidden benefit of joining the State is that any promotion includes a significant increase in stress for a marginal pay raise. There is no financial incentive to rise up the hierarchy. As such, I have no competition in my office. If someone else wants the headache, let them have it.

    John Minford’s commentary for this section includes this short poem by Li Bo for his friend the Taoist Hermit Yuan Danqiu.

    I envy you, my friend,
    Dwelling on East Mountain,
    Lover of beauteous hills and valleys,
    Asleep in the green season of spring
    Among empty forests,
    Rising long after daybreak,
    The wind in the pines
    Blowing through your sleeves,
    The stony brook washing your soul.
    I envy you,
    Lying there unperturbed,
    Pillowed high
    On your emerald mist.

    ~

    How to make peace?
    Wise souls keep their part of the contract
    and don’t make demands on others.
    People whose power is real fulfill their obligations;
    people whose power is hollow insist on their claims.

    excerpt from Tao Te Ching 79

    In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to get annoyed at an underperforming contractor or consultant. Such tendencies get worse the longer I hold this comfortable position of power. I need to constantly remind myself that I don’t have to insist on my rights — I hold the fucking checkbook. Unfortunately, I’m sometimes forced to remind my partners of their obligations and my expectations of their performance, but there’s no excuse for losing my cool.

    Whosoever lacks Inner Power will try to control Others by Force, will demand a due, exact a tithe, and Bitterness will ensue. The Tao of Softness and gentleness wards off Bitterness. Hardness and Strength, Vanity and Pride create Bitterness and Resentment

    John Minford’s translation of Magister Liu’s commentary

  • The Box, Marc Levinson, 2016

    I’m only a third through The Box, but I can already recommend it.

    A good history book creates context and energizes the mind. As we wrestle with the advent of AI, Levinson tells a a story of disruption that rhymes with what I fear we will see in the coming years.

    The world of shipping was completely different up through the first half of the 20th century before the invention and adoption of containers. Then the 50’s and 60’s flipped it upside down.

    • It’s mindblowing that we had a world of international trade with individually packed ships. How did we supply two world wars on opposite oceans merely with muscling things in and out holds?
    • What American doesn’t feel some sense of pride at a crazy innovator- entrepreneur stumbling into the creation of a new system to revolutionize the world?
    • The next chapter tells the utter devastation that this change wrought upon New York City. But was it ultimately for the better?
    • And chapter 6 details the struggles of the Longshoremen unions grappling with this change. (Good luck to us white collars, without any union support!)

    I’m curious what the next chapters will bring. It’s already been well worth the time. So surprising that the boring shipping container is the center of such a riveting narrative!

    ~

    Here’s a gratuitous plug for the boardgame Container by Franz-Benno Delonge. It’s one of my favorite games — a basic ruleset for a brainbursting experience. It’s been out of print for a while but can be easily DIY’ed.

  • My Little Library

    At the end of 2022, I started a rotation of books and essays to re-read regularly.

    I’m slowly going through them on this first pass, but in the future I plan on just reading selected passages.

    And yes, I’m open to suggestions!

    A spreadsheet with 45 books with their publication dates. Cells are colored by the region of origin.

    ~

    Main List

    1. The Art of War
    2. The Wisdom Books (Job thru Qohelet)
    3. Tao Te Ching
    4. Analects of Confucius
    5. The Way of Chuang Tzu
    6. Mencius
    7. Dhammapada
    8. Letter to Menoceus, Epicurus
    9. Bhagavad Gita
    10. Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius
    11. The Gospels and the Epistle to the Romans
    12. The Book of Lieh-Tzu
    13. The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton
    14. Bodhicarayvatara, Santideva
    15. Havamal
    16. The Book of Rumi:105 Stories (Masnavi)
    17. Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho
    18. US Constitution
    19. Gettysburg Address
    20. Nevada Constitution
    21. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
    22. Letter from the Birmingham Jail
    23. Labyrinths, Borges
    24. Invisible Cities, Calvino
    25. 5000 B.C., Smullyan
    26. 8 Pieces of Brocade
    27. Opus, Satoshi Kon
    28. Fail Safe Investing
    29. Bed of Procrustes
    30. Vis for Vulnerable
    31. Several Short Sentences about Writing
    32. Salt Fat Acid Heat
    33. Creativity, John Cleese
    34. Smart Brevity

    Maybes

    1. Upanishads
    2. Socratic Dialogues, Plato
    3. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
    4. Quran
    5. The Journey to the West
    6. Self Reliance, Emerson
    7. Civil Disobedience, Thoreau
    8. Essays and Aphorisms, Schopenhauer
    9. Species of Spaces, Perec
    10. Amusing Ourselves to Death
    11. Radically Short Instructions, Matthews